100bn API calls, 1bn payments - is governance keeping pace?
Open Banking Limited just confirmed that the UK's Open Banking ecosystem has passed one billion payments and 100 billion API calls across the CMA9 banks since launch, more than eight years ago. June alone recorded 2.81 billion API calls, the highest monthly volume to date, up 4.4% on May. Average response times improved to 349ms, 50ms faster than the previous reporting period.
Those are the headline numbers. The detail underneath them is more interesting.
Single Domestic Payments fell 1.2% in June. Sweeping Variable Recurring Payments rose 6.7%. That's not noise, it's a shift. The ecosystem is moving away from simple, one-off payments and toward standing, recurring payment relationships, exactly the kind where an intermediary sits between the bank and the end customer for months or years, not seconds.
And VRPs are about to get more complex, not less. The UK Payments Initiative, formed by 31 firms, is building out commercial VRPs on top of the existing sweeping model, extending the same rails to recurring business payments like utility bills. That's more use cases, more intermediaries, more third-party providers, all moving through an open finance chain most of them weren’t in a year ago.
Regulation governs this chain vertically. The FCA supervises what happens inside its own perimeter, on a periodic, point-in-time basis. It does not, and structurally cannot, see the open finance chain horizontally, in near real-time, as payments, data, and consent relationships move through it.
100 billion API calls is 100 billion opportunities for something to go wrong somewhere in that chain. Scale on its own isn't the risk. Scale without infrastructure that can verify who's in the network, monitor risk as it changes, and attribute liability when something breaks, is.
That's the gap Invela is built to close: Invela is the infrastructure layer that makes open finance trustworthy - accrediting who's in the network, monitoring risk in real time, and ensuring liability lands in the right place.
The ecosystem is proving it can scale. Now we need to scale the accountability infrastructure that supports it.
